Windows 7 is more than Vista done right, but you can't deny that it's based on Microsoft's embattled operating system. Despite improvements made over two service packs, users never took to Windows Vista.
Although the Windows 7 release candidate is still available for consumers to try out, the final version of Windows 7 aims to fix both perceived and real flaws from its predecessor. The appeal of the new interface is undeniable, and should compete well against Apple's OS X, but even with modern features like native touch-screen support does Windows 7 actually best XP? Read the full review and find out.
WebReview is a new extension for Firefox that attempts to make your start page smarter, and more suggestive based on past browsing habits. If you've used Google's Chrome, or have been keeping up with Mozilla's latest efforts to change what users are seeing when they first fire up their browser or open a new tab, the idea behind WebReview is the same.
When you install WebReview in Firefox (which for now is the only browser this extension runs in) it will give you four different sets of links. Like Chrome it will tell you both the last few tabs you had open, along with some of your most visited pages. Where it really shines, however is showing you a grouping of sites you visit daily, along with a suggestion of sites you may be interested in going to. It sorts these out by what day it is, along with the time. So if, for example, you visit a few news blogs every Monday morning it will keep track of that and offer them up as suggestions when you fire up your browser that same time of day.
Users with WebReview installed can see a slew of links when they load up their browser, including their most visited pages, along with suggestions of what they should read based on past browsing history.
(Credit: WebReview)The add-on provides more than just links though, it's also a secondary history tracker that can be used instead of the one that ships with Firefox. It will track all your browsing history and give you some powerful tools to go through it all including the option to sort by both domain and the number of visits. It also provides a thumbnail view of each page which you can preview before going back for another visit.
If you're not into going through the entirety of your history there's an alternate way to track how you browsed. Called graph view, it shows the breadcrumb trail of how you went from site to site for that entire session. You can also go back to specific days and see a large graph for the entire day. Visually it's very interesting, and exploratory at the same time.
WebReview was created by German developer Andreas Wagner as part of his thesis for University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern/Germany. It's also experimental, so you'll need to be registered with Mozilla's add-ons site to give it a go.
(Credit:
CNET)
Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.
Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.
The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go calibrates your location twice every time you open it, a repetition that quickly wears thin. Providing advanced search options to find, for instance, sushi restaurants nearby for under $30 would make the app immediately more winning.
iTunes App Store reviewers have also thoroughly picked a bone with the app over a "cheesy" link to other apps created by Zagat's mobile publishing partner, Handmark, and "frustrating," "misleading" information about the cities and countries covered. It's true that Zagat Survey is strongest in metropolitan US cities, with passable international coverage in the UK, Italy, and France, and some world cities, like Tokyo, Toronto, London, and Rome. Handmark should more explicitly list those cities to minimize the backlash.
It's also true that Zagat To Go will best serve the foodies who want to "cut through the garbage" found on Yelp's and Urbanspoon's iPhone apps and be funneled to finer dining. Big-city diners dedicated to Zagat's yearly survey have in this iPhone app a slightly more economical and much more convenient and interactive option than toting the book with them on travels near and far, or viewing the cramped mobile Web site from the Safari browser.
Update: 12/2/08 at 3:40 PM. Handmark commented in an e-mail that a new release being submitted to iPhone's App Store for approval today will request location access upon launching the app for the first time. A button on the main search screen will let you manually update your new location.
Search is inextricably woven into the use of computers, but it's still a relative rarity when it comes to the mobile phone market.
That's why I was keen to try Yahoo's attempt to make the technology more approachable through its free voice-controlled search product, OneSearch with Voice. My overall assessment after trying it on a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 Yahoo lent to me: the software is useful, but it whetted my appetite more than it actually transformed my life.
Pressing the phone's 'talk' button initiates a OneSearch with Voice query.
(Credit: Yahoo)To use OneSearch with Voice, you hold down your phone's "talk" button and speak a few words into the phone. The phone sends what you said to Yahoo servers that convert it into text and run a search tailored for mobile phone users. Whereupon, the results and sometimes an accompanying ad appear on the phone.
It didn't always produce the right answer, but it did so often enough and easily enough that I found myself turning to the application more and more frequently. And its textual results were more useful for me than Google's 1-800-GOOG-411 voice-only search service.
There's no secret why Yahoo is eager for the market: mobile search is growing fast and is a powerful conduit for targeted advertising.
Google long since passed Yahoo for search on personal computers, but the mobile market is relatively immature--and it's growing fast. From June 2007 to June 2008, "the number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 percent and 63 percent, respectively," according to ComScore analyst Alistair Hill, and the number in the U.S. grew 104 percent to 10 million. But Google leads Yahoo by a wide margin for mobile search usage in the U.S., U.K., Italy, France, Spain, and Germany.
So how's does OneSearch with Voice stack up?
What's good
The best thing about the service, far and away, is that it frees you from your phone's keyboard. Even on finger-friendly phones such as the BlackBerry, typing is a pain. With voice control, you can run searches much more easily.
I'll plead the Fifth about whether I tried OneSearch while driving, but there are other times when one-handed typing on a phone keypad is difficult. One early aha moment came while I was walking through the rain holding an umbrella. Another was lugging a bag through the airport. With OneSearch with Voice, I could have my say, then check back after a few moments to see if the phone fetched what I wanted rather than trying to pay attention to typing and walking at the same time.
... Read more
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Do you make the same typing mistakes over and over? A lot of people have trouble with certain words, and even though they know the correct spelling, just can't seem to train themselves to type those words correctly.
Set up your own abbreviations for commonly used phrases.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Typinator for Mac automatically corrects your most often-made mistakes, and works system-wide so you'll never have to worry about those pesky words again. What's more, Typinator can autofill e-mail addresses and other frequently used phrases using user-designated abbreviations.
Check out our new review of Typinator to see why it just might be the time-saving typing tool you've been looking for.
When I'm parsing product reviews on Amazon.com I usually look at two things after the price tag: the rating and how many people have reviewed it. This simple system tends to breaks down when it comes time to dig deeper into those sometimes thousands of reviews, which is where Pluribo comes in handy.
This small browser extension will go over everyone's ratings and pull out bits and pieces it finds noteworthy based on a similar words that pop up in rated reviews. The developer says it currently works the best on electronics items but that other items will soon work better with the automation. Trying to use it on something like books, movies or CDs (all Amazon's bread and butter sales) will simply give you an error message.
I gave it a spin on several electronics I own, and it came up with fantastic results. One of them in particular, an iPod nano, was one of the better examples of how the tool can be useful. In its analysis, it showed that one of the most reoccurring user complaints was scratching, while nearly everyone else raved over its features and overall design. Not a bad take considering it parsed over 700 reviews in just a few seconds. Better yet, I didn't have to read any of them.
This got me thinking about how wonderful this would be for some news tracking services. For example, Google News will pull up thousands of related headlines to major stories, but if you want to quickly digest it you'll have to depend on a site that will summarize the content. A tool like Pluribo could simply go through each article and pull out keywords. Such a task for every news story requires a seriously good analysis engine--not to mention a user understanding of potential error, but the potential here is huge.
One thing that sets tools like Pluribo apart from human-powered systems is that it's doing all the number crunching per user request, meaning the synopsis won't be outdated or need to be redone at a later date. Other attempts at review aggregation for consumer electronics include Pricegrabber and Retrevo which both grab professional and user reviews for easy parsing; however, neither will chart out those reviews.
I'm hoping future iterations will forgo the need for you to install anything and instead make use of the sidebar or use an IFrame instead. As it stands you'll need to have Firefox to give this one a spin.
[found on Makeuseof]
Once Pluribo is installed, any electronic item (and soon other things) on Amazon.com will be analyzed based on user reviews. The good and the bad will be picked out and charted for the sake of your eyes (and time).
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